A commercial for a skin-whitening lotion called White Secret has inspired some musings about race and skin color in Mexico. A few thoughts.

Hello again, from the biggest city in the world!* A few weekends ago, I went to a very fresa bar with some of my lawyer friends here (young feminist lawyers from the organization I work for). Fresa, in Mexico, means rich, snooty, haughty, etc. Literally, it means strawberry, and it is used to describe the upscale young people of which there are multitude in Mexico City. First clue: you have to buy a bottle to sit a table, and bottles were around US$130. WHAT!? Bottles of alcohols like Bacardi and Absolut cost about US$15 in the grocery stores here.

There’s been quite a storm of discussion lately about inflation in Argentina. My understanding is that at the beginning of the year the government agency that was in charge of calculating inflation came out with some numbers that were relatively high. That upset the president (Nestor Kirchner) and apparently there was an argument which resulted, more or less, in the president insisting that future inflation reports should be more in line with his perceptions (i.e. lower and also completely invalid). I should note that Argentines tend to love conspiracies and are often quite critical of their government, so this version of the inflation story may not be completely accurate.

Obviously, this is not going to be a very academic argument. I read Memoirs ten years ago and although this was my pre-liberal arts education time and my mind had not yet been ideologically molded to fit films into theory I was still aware that there was something incredibly disturbing about the book. A white man writing about what life is like as a glorified Asian prostitute. Asian women who find their only power through sex (or what I would now label "hypersexual behavior").

Today we spent inadvertently observing how San Salvador’s rich live.  Our guide mentioned that many travelers to El Salvador are surprised by San Salvador’s glitzy side and I’d have to say I’m one of them.  Yesterday we spent a short time transferring busses in Guatemala City—a capital that I’m sure has its bright spots, but one that seems to me like a small piece of hell.  When we originally arrived in San Salvador at the beginning of the trip, my vision of it was the same as many Central American capitals—polluted, full of traffic, industrial, dingy, dirty, and delapidated.  Escaping the city on that first day brought on my culture shock, while now, another part of that same city is creating a new shock.  We’re staying along the Boulevard de los heroes, a street full of chain restaurants and one of San Salvador’s nicest malls.  This morning we watched the Argentina vs. Germany World Cup game in the bar of one of San Salvadors ritziest hotels—the Real Intercontinental, where the bathroom is nicer than any hotel room we’ve stayed at so far.  The hotel is full of Salvadorian and international businessmen (not so many women), and the bar is packed with suits…or at least ties since it’s so hot in here.  Smoke fills the air and men are sipping tequila and whiskey at 9:00am.  Later in the day, we went to the Museo de arte (MARTE) and stopped for lunch in the art museum restaurant.  Looking like our typical unkempt travel selves, we weren’t quite prepared for the poshness of the restaurant, or of the other restaurant guests.  While the men watched the morning world cup game on the big projected screens in a bar, the women of leisure watched the afternoon game between conversations on the small muted restaurant tvs.  In the morning we saw a small slice of the wealthy male elite, while in the afternoon we saw their wives.  Well-dressed and put together, these women, accustomed to air conditioning and owners of SUVs, are the inspiration for telenovela characters.  Later in the evening we paid a visit to the local mall (are we in America?) and couldn’t decide if the middle class is growing with its thirst for American-style consumerism, or if this is how those lucky few live.  When we left the mall to head back to the hotel for the night, we remembered that we’re still in El Salvador when we saw a young boy juggling for money in the street.